You've got a army of programmers, put em to work. Most of us do it for free anyway....Allow the community to help make the site better in ways that you dont have time to?

There are enough security holes and potential sql injections as it is The cost of cleaning up after a hack, both in hours and in money spent, is enough to put this whole project to make money at risk. No 3rd party code is going to run on JGO, unless the site is actually hacked

I have had a little ponder on this problem and I have come at it from another angle: Reduce the need to pay for bandwith.

I posit that members of this forum are more than willing to donate their spare bandwith to help reduce costs, so why not provide them with a program that will run in the background on their computers that will offload some of the bandwith.

What form this offloading will take is the question... initially I thought that they could host a webserver and then host static content but that may not provide sufficient reduction in bandiwith/server load. So my next thought was perhaps to have a faux-cloud solution where a member could host a VM which would be donated to our benevolent overload Riven to install some sort of distributed instancing of the forum and so the real java-gaming.org webserver simply redirects to one or more of these instances.

Bandwidth/datatraffic is not really the problem, and distributing webservices and databases is a lot of work.

JGO sends about 80GB per month, and the smallest Linode account features 2TB of datatraffic, so there is not a penny to save on traffic.

If we really want to save a few bucks, I could disable the Linode Backup service, which saves $5 / month, but then we really ought to have people willing to setup their servers to receive this backup, and are available nearly 24/7 in case something terrible happens to the Linode VPS.

I'm not sure saving $5 / month is worth this hassle

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How much traffic is from logged in users compared to random people? I know I wouldn't mind seeing a couple non-obtrusive ads on here when I'm logged in, and I bet the people suggesting you take donations wouldn't mind either (especially if you had a little link explaining why you need ads under said ad). You could even hide some of the more obtrusive ads for logged-in users.

This would help your view count on PW go up, which in turn might attract higher bids.

Of course, if logged-in users are only a small percentage of your traffic, this advice is null and void.

I'm in a similar boat with my own website (although on a *much* smaller scale), and I understand your hesitation to take money from the users. So maybe just showing more ads (not in-your-face ads, but PW seems pretty good most of the time) is the simplest solution?

Edit: I'm an idiot. I see now that there is an ad on the side. Talk about unobtrusive, I didn't even notice it was there!

Back in early 2010 when I added AdSense, everything seemed to go well. Within three months I reached the payout threshold of about $100, and I was a happy overlord. Unfortunately, in spring 2010 some guy from Belgium (according to his IP) clicked ~20 times on the same ad. I reported this activity to Google, with the offending IP address, and they quickly responded by suspending my AdSense account, indefinitely... in case you're wondering, yes, it is still banned and yes, I contested their decision to no avail.

That's totally unfair! I was reading about adsense and how to lift the ban and everyone says it's impossible.But there's this discussion on google's product forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/BQYp_jvO13kMaybe if you raised the matter in a new thread there then they might notice? Seems bizarre that they ban you for doing the right thing.

Accepting donations from members would be fine. For the older members here a cost of $10 per year is nothing. I'm sure there'd be at least 30 members who'd pay $10 from their paypal account to keep JGO going. That would cover costs for about the next 2 years.

Another option may be to use the community more. I have a VPS of which I use barely 1% which could be used to host JGO. I'm sure others are in the same situation. But the hassle of moving JGO to new hosts would be a waste of labour.

Riven, I know you are hesitant to accept money, or exclude others who have not donated etc... (which is very respectable), but I think there's a point when you have to let that go, at least a little), so JGO can be self-funded. I would absolutely love to pay a few dollars in return for this amazing website, and I think it would be wise to accept these donations. Sure, people may only donate once, but think about all the extra money you could get by just taking donations. You never know, it may be enough to cover the costs for a while. Now I'm not saying have premium accounts, but just allow donations. I believe many people here would donate just because, and not expect anything in return. This forum is remarkably NOT selfish.

"We were told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period (which is why account bans never occur immediately after a payout). The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public."

"We were told to get rid of as many of the accounts with the largest checks/payouts/earnings waiting to happen. No reason, just do it, and don’t question it. It was heart wrenching seeing all that money people had earned all get stolen from them. And that’s what I saw it as, it was a robbery of the AdSense publishers. Many launched appeals, complaints, but it was futile because absolutely no one actually took the time to review the appeals or complaints. Most were simply erased without even being opened, the rest were deposited into the database, never to be touched again."

"It first began with just altering data reports for Analytics account holders that alsohad an AdSense account, but they ran into too many issues and decided it would be simpler just to skew the report data across the board to remain consistent and implement features globally.So what this means is that the statistical data for a website using Google Analytics is not even close to being accurate. The numbers are incredibly deflated. The reasoning behind their decision is that if an individual links their AdSense account and their Analytics account, the Analytics account can be used to deflate the earnings automatically without any human intervention"

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Well if it means anything, if the price is within my price range I'd have no problem buying some ad space on JGO for my game, once I get to that point. Even if the clicks I get don't really amount to many sales. I'd just look at it like a recurring donation to keep the doors open.

The hell are you talking about, its really specific about group names, functions, what happened when, what the orders where and when and from who (not by NAME, granted), how they were executed. ALL of them are either true or false - easy to validate from anybody who works there

I already read that many many accounts were indeed suspended shortly before payoff

Well, it's a supposed leak. Maybe I needed to stress that more clearly. Indeed we'll have to see how it plays out. It however matches up with a lot of publisher experiences - which either means it's accurate, or carefully crafted.

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I think the leak is false, it doesn't make sense that Google would ban a website that is displaying successful AdSense advertisements, making money for the website publisher and google.Perhaps this is a disgruntled employee or just a trouble-maker who made it all up. Another question, why didn't the people who resigned earlier in protest not spill the leak? They would have nothing to lose.

I think the leak is false, it doesn't make sense that Google would ban a website that is displaying successful AdSense advertisements, making money for the website publisher and google.Perhaps this is a disgruntled employee or just a trouble-maker who made it all up.

At first glance, yes, but Google AdSense doesn't quite work like that. Advertisers (not publishers) often specify a daily budget, even if your screw over / kill off 25% of your publishers, your advertisers will spend roughly the same amount of money on ads, as you shrink the publisher pool, which forces the prices to go up for the remaining publishers, due to laws of supply and demand. Google is in the position to work the market this way, because they don't have much competition.

Another question, why didn't the people who resigned earlier in protest not spill the leak? They would have nothing to lose.

You can still get sued if you share information about a company that you are not allowed to share (which is described in your contract).

If anything, this 'leak' (whether is it made up or not) shows that Google's public relations are abysmal to the point where people are willing to believe that Google has been screwing them over, as part of their master plan.

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